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Traditional Claustrophobia — Intersections of Gender
and Religious Identities in Nadeem Aslam’s
Maps for Lost Lovers
JUTTA WEINGARTEN
(JUSTUS LIEBIG UNIVERSITY GIESSEN, GERMANY)
English Abstract
This article proposes readings of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) as a
novel offering multiple critiques on the situation of Muslim immigrants in Great
Britain. The novel relates how the Pakistani immigrant community deals with the
murder of the lost lovers referred to in the title and the challenges the honour killing
poses to their religious beliefs. The main characters of the narrative, Kaukab, Shamas
and Suraya represent conflicting perspectives on life in the diasporic community and
on coping with the tragedy. By focusing on the setting and the atmosphere created in
the novel and by connecting it to the intersections of gender and religious identities,
this article aims to point out the ways in which Aslam’s novel gives the reader
insights into its Pakistani immigrant community and offers different interpretations
of this community. By subversively reconfiguring the patriarchal society, the novel
exerts manifold criticisms of the Muslim immigrant community as well as of the
failing multicultural British society.
German Abstract
Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, verschiedene Interpretationsansätze des Romans Maps for Lost
Lovers (2004, dt. Atlas für verschollene Liebende 2005) von Nadeem Aslam
vorzustellen. Der Roman, der den Ehrenmord an den namensgebenden „Lost Lovers” zum
Ausgangspunkt der Erzählung wählt, erlaubt durch seine Erzählstrategien durchaus
unterschiedliche Lesarten, die als Kritik an der Situation muslimischer Einwanderer in
Großbritannien aufgefasst werden können. Hauptaugenmerk der Erzählung liegt auf den
Protagonisten, Kaukab, Shamas und Suraya, die grundverschiedene Einstellungen zum
Leben in der diasporischen Gemeinschaft widerspiegeln und so den Leser die Ereignisse
durch ihre Perspektiven wahrnehmen und interpretieren lassen. Die aufeinanderprallenden
Wertesysteme geben Einblicke in die verschiedenen – teils radikalen – Positionen innerhalb
der Gemeinschaft, die letztendlich zu der am Anfang stehenden Katastrophe führen. Durch
eine Analyse des Handlungsorts und der vorherrschenden Atmosphäre des Romans, die mit
der Intersektion von Geschlechts- und Glaubensidentitäten in Beziehung gesetzt werden,
beleuchtet dieser Artikel die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten zur Interpretation und die
verschiedenen Kritiken, die der Roman an der die Integration verweigernden pakistanischen
Gemeinschaft und der versagenden multikulturellen britischen Gesellschaft übt.
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I. Introduction
In conjunction with almost daily news coverage of the terrorist attacks by
fundamental Islamist groups in the Middle East, a growing suspicion against Muslim
communities in Europe can be noticed. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 the
strong foundations of European multiculturalism seem to have been unsettled. Even
in Great Britain, with its long history of immigration from the South Asian
subcontinent, racism against Muslim communities is worsening.1 Stereotypes and
prejudices against so-called ‘parallel societies’, as some closed immigrant
communities have come to be described, are repeatedly underscored, for example by
public discussions about the right of Muslim women to wear the traditional burka.2 In
such a precarious socio-historical context a novel like Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost
Lovers3 might seem to be adding fuel to the fire.
Maps for Lost Lovers, Aslam’s second novel and winner of the Pakistan Academy
of Letters Patras Bokhari Award of the Government of Pakistan, centres on a South
Asian immigrant community in an unnamed British town. The narration begins with
the disappearance of the lovers Chanda and Jugnu and the ensuing arrest of
Chanda’s brothers for the alleged murder of the couple. In the months that follow the
honour killings, Maps for Lost Lovers dramatises how the Pakistani inhabitants of the
tightly-knit community try to cope with the anguish and uncertainty which the
disappearance of the couple brings over them. Wavering between the unlikely hope
of their running away and the almost certain knowledge of their deaths, the novel’s
1
The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance on the United Kingdom has recently
confirmed the rising numbers of attacks on Muslim communities all over Britain. Cf. European
Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, “ECRI Report on the United Kingdom,”
http://www.coe.int/ecri, accessed 5 March 2010. See also recent newspaper articles such as: Seumas
Milne, “This tide of anti-Muslim hatred is a threat to us all,” in The Guardian 25 February 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/25/anti-muslim-hatred-threat-to-all,
accessed 5 March 2010.
2
This discussion is primarily conducted in France where a ban of the niqab, which — similar to the
burka — veils the face of its wearer completely except for a small vision slit, is being planned.
Cf. Lizzy Davies, “The young French women fighting to defend the full-face veil,” in The Observer 31
January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/31/french-muslim-burqa-veil-niqab,
accessed 5 March 2010.
3
Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). All references to the novel will
hereafter be marked by the abbreviation MLL.
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characters have to deal with challenges to their religious beliefs and the question of
following Islamic Law in exile.
Although the narration portrays “some of the worst aspects of life in Pakistani
communities — honour killings, religious obscurantism, gender inequities to name
only a few,” it is also a “book of great humanity and compassion”4. These worst
aspects of the Pakistani community depicted in Maps for Lost Lovers, pointed out by
Kamila Shamsie in an interview with the author, will be the starting point of the
following analysis. This paper sets out to examine the immigrant community, which
bases itself on the obedience to Islamic Law, and to illustrate how an atmosphere of
claustrophobia is narratively created in the patriarchal society. In a second step, I will
also point out how intersections of gender and religious identity, as well as gender
inequities, are reinforced by the Islamic beliefs of the community. I will try to show
how, on the one hand, the characters fall victim to the gender roles which their belief
assigns to them; and, on the other hand, how they use and subvert these roles in
order to shape the community in traditional and religious ways that reinforce the
patriarchal structures of the community and promote religious obscurantism.
My examination of the novel aims to draw attention to the many-faceted critique
to be found in Maps for Lost Lovers. Focussing on the atmosphere of the novel in
combination with the gender identities that it presents, I argue that the novel can be
read in at least three ways: first, it can be read as backing up the suspicious held
within non-Muslim British society concerning Muslims, as well as confirming the
stereotypes of Muslims presented by the media. Second, it can be read as inherent
criticism of colonisation in that certain structures of the British Empire are invoked,
reproduced and proven to be leading to the catastrophe. And finally, the novel can
be read as a criticism of Muslim immigrant communities in Britain and their wish to
avoid integration. It is however the interweaving of these possible readings that
reveals the novel’s potential as promoting a mutual understanding between the
internally diverse immigrant community and the British host society.
4
Kamila Shamsie, “Writer at Heart,” in Newsline July 2004, www.newsline.com.pk/newsJul2004/
bookjul2.htm, accessed 19 February 2010.
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II. Dasht-e-Tanhaii, or The Desert of Loneliness
In the absence of the lost lovers Chanda and Jugnu5, who disappear before the
narration begins and whose fate remains unknown until the end of the story, the
remaining characters and their reactions function as a foil for the lovers’ decision to
forsake Islamic Law in order to be together, as well as their readiness to bear the
consequences of their choice. In the wake of the lovers’ disappearance the
community is torn between mourning their loss and a sense of righteousness that the
lovers have been punished for their indecent behaviour. Especially Jugnu’s older
brother Shamas and his wife Kaukab, who live next door to the “house of Sin” (MLL
59), move into the centre of the omniscient narrator’s attention. Through an
alternating focalization on the main characters, Shamas and Kaukab, as well as
Shamas’s lover Suraya, a multifaceted narration is presented. The open perspective
structure of the novel, created through the various individual perspectives in the text
and their relation to each other, gives insights into the norms and value systems of
the characters and thus allows for an inspection of the represented society.6 Through
this narrative technique of presenting different perspectives, the reader is invited to
share the perceptions of the characters. It is thus not only the value systems and
attitudes toward honour killings of the characters which are revealed, but also their
experiences of the diaspora in an unspecified English town in which the drama
around the lost lovers unfolds.
The inhabitants of the town have come to England from all over the South Asian
subcontinent, representing the manifold nationalities that came under the rule of the
British Empire. The new name which the diasporic South Asian community has
given to the English town — Dasht-e-Tanhaii, translating as “The Wilderness of
5
Contrary to this interpretation, it could also be argued that Shamas and his secret lover Suraya are
the lost lovers of the novel’s title, as Shamas in the very end of the novel dies searching for Suraya
who, in the meantime, has married another man. However, for the present attempt at interpreting
the novel on the basis of setting and atmosphere I will focus on the murdered couple as the referred
to lost lovers as both characters seem to be haunting the community and despite their absence
influence the narrative significantly.
6
Cf. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. (Stuttgart:
Klett, 2008), 58; Burkhard Niederhoff, “Perspective/Point of View,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds.
Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 384397, here: 384.
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Solitude” or “The Desert of Loneliness” (cf. MLL 29) — is a telling name for the
neighbourhood. Although the characters share a similar cultural background and the
experience of exile, their religious differences and their fear of interacting with white
people paralyses them. Representative of this community is Kaukab, who relates that
she had made friends with some women in the area but she barely knew what lay
beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: [she was]
full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of
another Subcontinental religion or grouping. (MLL 32)
The inability to interact with people of a different skin colour or different religious
beliefs renders it impossible for the people of Dasht-e-Tanhaii not to be lonely. The
neighbourhood is described as lapsing into silence because “it hoards its secrets,
unwilling to let on the pain in its breast. Shame, guilt, honour and fear are like
padlocks hanging from mouths. No one makes a sound in case it draws attention. No
one speaks. No one breathes” (MLL 45). The claustrophobic atmosphere created in
the novel forces the characters to spend their lives in solitude, always afraid that their
neighbours might learn about their secrets.
Contributing to this atmosphere is the concealment of the name and location of
the English town in contrast to its having been renamed by the immigrants. The
appropriation of the metropolitan neighbourhood by the diasporic South Asian
community, along with the setting of strict limits to isolate it from the rest of the
town,7 reverses the imperialist colonization of the immigrants’ home countries. The
re-naming of streets and landmarks within the neighbourhood further supports this
argument and highlights the reverse appropriation of social space.
As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here
as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka.
Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this
town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. […] But over
the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the
Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they
themselves are from — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name
7
In one of the very few instances when one of the characters leaves the neighbourhood, Chanda’s
father gives an insight into the panic that seizes him: “He is suddenly aware that they are on the
outskirts of the town, alone and exposed, in an unfamiliar place — away from their
neighbourhood.” (MLL 174)
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has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town
itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii. (MLL 29)
As Cordula Lemke has pointed out, the process of the multiple re-namings according
to the immigrants’ various cultural backgrounds transforms the neighbourhood into
“an enormous palimpsest”8. Taking up the street names which the British introduced
into their colonies on the Asian subcontinent and transplanting them to the
immigrant community in Britain can be read as a strategy of decolonization. The
palimpsestic transplantation of the colonial structure onto the British neighbourhood
leaves the original structure scarcely discernable underneath the different names and
accentuates the “transitional status of all cultures”9.
The process of renaming the streets also resembles the respective developments
of the different countries of the subcontinent under British rule leading up to the
partition of India in 1947. The fictional immigrants’ situation develops from an
initially appreciated communal life (cf. MLL 13) into a coexistence with only limited
interaction — a development which is based on the growing numbers immigrants,
but which also critically mirrors the situation on the subcontinent, where the
Partition of India divided the country along religious lines and has also led to bitter
wars about territorial claims ever since. And as on the subcontinent, it is religious
beliefs that now segregate the people of Dasht-e-Tanhaii.10
The imitation and copying of the colonial situation is further taken from the
macro-level of re-naming the streets of the town onto the micro-level in the form of
the house Shamas and Kaukab live in. The house in Dasht-e-Tanhaii is, in the the
colouring of its rooms, an exact replica of the parental home in Pakistan (cf. MLL 5).
Therefore, in being an occupied part of a British town and in having had its streets
renamed, the neighbourhood subversively replicates, on the one hand, the colonial
situation of the subcontinent. On the other hand, however, it also relives the
8
Cordula Lemke, “Racism in the Diaspora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004),” in MultiEthnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts, eds. Lars Eckstein, et al.
(Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008), 171-183, here 172.
9
Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the
Cartographic Connection”, in Past the Last Post. Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, eds.
Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 125-138, here: 131.
10
For a comprehensive overview of the events that led to the partition and its consequence see e. g. Ian
Talbot, Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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traumatic experience of a society being divided. On a more personal level, it also
reflects on the process of immigration, in that Shamas tries to rebuild his parental
home in England in order to create a home for himself and his family in an
environment where they are strangers.
What these interpretations share are a sense of loss and an essential sadness,
which Edward Said ascribes to exile:
At bottom, exile is a jealous state. With very little to possess, you hold on to what
you have with aggressive defensiveness. What you achieve in exile is precisely what
you have no wish to share, and it is in the drawing of lines around you and your
compatriots that the least attractive aspects of being an exile emerge: an exaggerated
sense of group solidarity as well as a passionate hostility towards outsiders, even
those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you.11
In this piece, written for Harper’s Magazine twenty years prior to Aslam’s novel, Said
describes exactly the situation of the characters in Maps for Lost Lovers. In the blind
defensiveness of their traditions and beliefs, the immigrants of Dasht-e-Tanhaii are
passionate in their racism against the white inhabitants of the town and condemn
their exile in Great Britain for all the evil that has happened to them:
Kaukab knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah because He is the
creator and ruler of the entire earth — as the stone carving on Islamabad airport
reminds and reassures the heartbroken people who are having to leave Pakistan —
but she cannot contain her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to face this
lonely ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom. (MLL 31)
The loss of their home country and the realisation that they will never go back to
Pakistan fills the community with a feeling of unbearable loss:
Kaukab, a picture of loneliness, waiting for Shamas to come home, remembers how
the tannoy announcement at the bus station always makes her think she’s in
Pakistan and a Friday sermon is being conveyed over a mosque loudspeaker, and
the other women tell her that it’s happened to them too. One woman tries to hold
back her tears because she’s beginning to realize that she would never be able to go
back to live in her own country […]. (MLL 45)
Whereas they manage to bring back the colours of their parental homes and re-name
the streets so that they do not sound so unfamiliar, there are too many things in exile
that cannot be replaced. The constant feeling of loss, which makes the immigrants in
Dasht-e-Tanhaii refrain from leaving their solitude, is the ubiquitous atmosphere
11
Edward S. Said, “The Mind of Winter,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 439-442, here: 440 f.
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evoked by the narrative and as such is already introduced in the opening of the novel
by Shamas:
Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose a season,
because, in the part of Pakistan that he is from, there are five seasons in a year, not
four, the schoolchildren learning their names and sequence through classroom
chants: Mausam-e-Sarma, Bahar, Mausam-e-Garma, Barsat, Khizan. Winter, Spring,
Summer, Monsoon, Autumn. (MLL 5)
The loss of a season, of a structuring part of a year, a part that also marks the passing
of time, reflects the stasis of the society of Dasht-e-Tanhaii. In missing a part that
marks temporality and transience, change and development have become impossible
for the inhabitants of the community. In the knowledge of missing a season, the
structure of the novel, which is divided into four parts, each named after one of the
four seasons in England, seems like a constant reminder that Maps for Lost Lovers is
all about encompassing loss. Correspondingly, Said points out that “a life of exile
moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at
home.”12
The created atmosphere is a fertile soil for the kind of religious fundamentalism
which some of the characters, especially Kaukab, the sister-in-law of the murdered
Jugnu, prefer to integration. The “immense fact of isolation and displacement, which
produces the kind of narcissistic masochism that resists all efforts at amelioration,
acculturation, and community,”13 which Kaukab claims for herself, leads to what
Vijay Mishra has termed the “diasporic imaginary.”14 Mishra argues that in order to
preserve the loss of the diasporic experience, communities construct racist fictions of
purity around which anti-miscegenation narratives concerning homelands are
constructed, often in opposition to the actual reality of the homelands themselves.15
The unknown British town is constantly contrasted with Pakistan and depicted as a
12
Said, “The Mind of Winter” (cf. note 11), 442.
13
Said, “The Mind of Winter” (cf. note 11), 441.
14
Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary. Theorizing the Indian Diaspora,” in The Postcolonial Studies
Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London/New York: Routledge, 2006),
447–450, here: 448. Mishra defines the ‘diasporic imaginary’ as “any ethnic enclave in a nation-state
that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or because of the political self-interest of a racialized
nation-state, as a group that lives in displacement”.
15
Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” (cf. note 14), 449.
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foreign territory in which the Islamic Law has become the sole source of orientation
for most of the inhabitants. Kaukab therefore exalts the Pakistan of her memory into
an idealised nation in which Islam still figures prominently in everyday life:
If her children were still living at home, or if Shamas was back from work, Kaukab
would have asked the matchmaker to lower her voice to a whisper, not wishing her
children to hear anything bad about Pakistan or the Pakistanis, not wishing to
provide Shamas with the opportunity to make a disrespectful comment about Islam,
or hint through his expression that he harboured contrary views on Allah’s inherent
greatness; but she is alone in the house, so she lets the woman talk. (MLL 42)
Within this ‘diasporic imaginary’, the glorification of Pakistan provides the
immigrants with role model for their society. They recreate patriarchal social
structures in which the women wait at home for their husbands to return and are
afraid to be seen talking to other men on the street, in which daughters are betrothed
to their cousins in Pakistan and lovers of different religions are forbidden to marry
(cf. MLL 9), and in which fathers renounce their daughters for living in sin after three
failed arranged marriages (cf. MLL 176). In this strict, Islamic law-abiding
community, the gender roles of the characters seem to be as traditional as the rest of
the customs which the immigrants live by. However, in the following section I will
argue that the novel actually challenges the idea that the claustrophobic sentiments
are created solely by men and instead presents female characters who also maintain a
struggle for the patriarchal society. In this way, the novel exposes possible
misconceptions concerning gender roles in religious communities.
III. Intersections of Gender and Religion in Maps for Lost Lovers
Analysing gender identities in Maps for Lost Lovers is, as the previous discussion of
the novel’s atmosphere has shown, closely interlinked with religious identities
within the novel’s depicted community. As the discussion of gender roles and
identities in relation to power structures is already a very well established field of
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research for literary scholars, a focus on terminological distinctions between different
religious identities within Islam appears to be important for the further analysis.16
I therefore want to draw attention to the difference between the terms ‘Muslim’
and ‘Islamist’, as spelled out by Miriam Cooke17. Cooke points out that the two
terms, which might inadvertently be confused, hint at a significant distinction. To be
Muslim, according to Cooke, is an ascribed identity: “Those to whom a Muslim
identity is ascribed participate in a Muslim culture and community without
necessarily accepting all of its norms and values.”18 While Muslims can be secular
and only occasionally observe some of the rituals, Islamists achieve their “sometimes
militant identity by devoting their lives to the establishment of an Islamic state.”19
This opposition, which may arguably attract the criticism of being essentialist, will in
this analysis serve the purpose of breaking up common stereotypes concerning the
intersections between gender and religious identities. It is the aim of the following
analysis to show that the intersections between gender and religious identities cannot
be oversimplified through any kind of dichotomy according to stereotypical or
common notions, but are subverted by Aslam in order to point out the dangers of
religious fundamentalism and how it can lead to religious obscurantism.
The question of the relation between religion and feminism has posed itself as a
difficult field for research, especially for postcolonial feminists. Ania Loomba has
pointed out two significant developments in this field: “Many postcolonial regimes
have been outrightly repressive of women’s rights, using religion as the basis on
which to enforce their subordination.”20 In some Islamic countries the national
identity is based on an Islamicisation of civil society, an alliance between
fundamentalism and the State, which can, in its extreme forms, entail severe
16
In the following analysis of the gender roles in Maps for Lost Lovers the focus will mainly be on the
intersection of gender and Islamic religious identities as the protagonists of the novel are Muslims.
As characters of other religions do not feature prominently in the novel and are minor characters in
the narrative they will be excluded in this analysis.
17
Miriam Cooke, “Multiple Critique. Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies,” in Postcolonialism,
Feminism, and Religious Discourse, eds. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Ian (New York/London:
Routledge, 2002), 142-159, here: 145.
18
Cooke, “Multiple Critique” (cf. note 17), 145.
19
Cooke, “Multiple Critique” (cf. note 17), 145.
20
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 189.
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curtailment of freedom for women.21 However, Loomba also sees a development that
tries to “harness women’s political activity and even militancy to right-wing
movements and especially to religious fundamentalism. In various parts of the
world, women have been active campaigners for the Hindu, Islamic or Christian
right-wing
movements.”22
These
two
opposing
developments,
however
contradictory they might seem, deal with stereotypical assumptions such as that of
the figure of the “immigrant woman victim”23, which Leti Volpp has analysed and
debunked. This figure relates to the assumption that “non-Western women are
situated within cultural contexts that require their subordination, achieved by a
discursive strategy that constructs gender subordination as integral to their
culture.”24 Volpp disproves this idea of the oppressed non-Western women by
pointing out how the figure of the immigrant woman victim is discursively
constructed, showing that an insistent focus on this character denies the existence of
“agency within patriarchy”25. This form of agency, which originally refers to the
capacity for emancipatory change of the status of women on their own behalves, is
one of the possible interpretations of the intersection of gender and religious
identities that Aslam’s novel offers to its readers.
My discussion of these intersections of different personal identities will
concentrate on the three main focalizers, Kaukab, Shamas and Suraya, who give
insights into their conceptions of the intersections between gender and religious
identity.26 They represent different positions on the spectrum between secular
Muslims and Islamists and because of their own personal situations, which are all
significantly shaped by their relation to their religion, present interesting insights
into the interrelation of gender and religious identity.
21
Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (cf. note 20), here: 189.
22
Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (cf. note 20), here: 188.
23
Leti Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” in Columbia Law Review 101.5 (2001), 1181-1218,
here: 1183.
24
Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” (cf. note 23), here: 1185.
25
Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” (cf. note 23), here: 1211. Italics in the original.
26
Cf. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (Stuttgart/Weimar:
Metzler, 2004). For more information on gendered narrative perspectives see the contribution to this
volume by Gaby Allrath and Carola Surkamp, p. 143-179.
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Shamas, with whom the narration begins, was brought up as a Muslim but
considers himself a non-believer (cf. MLL 20) and instead of drawing on religion for
moral and ethical support as does the rest of the community, he turns to
Communism (cf. MLL 324).27 His secularism makes him the only mediator between
the different religious groups of Dasht-e-Tanhaii and he uses his outsider’s position
to move about freely between the mosque and the Hindu temple. His general
openness and willingness to interact with people of different religious and cultural
backgrounds additionally makes him the only connection to British society:
The director of the Community Relations Council, Shamas is the person the
neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own,
visiting his office in the town centre or bringing the problem to his front door that
opens directly into the blue-walled kitchen with the yellow chairs. (MLL 15)
On the one hand, this position as mediator makes Shamas a person of respect in the
neighbourhood. On the other hand, his secularism arouses suspicion, especially that
of his own wife, who disapproves of his criticism of Islam and goes as far as to blame
her father for choosing an unbelieving husband who is no proper Muslim in her
opinion (cf. MLL 34). In Kaukab’s eyes his worldliness and openness even make him
a bad father to their three children:
Oh your father will be angry, oh your father will be upset: Mah-Jabin had grown up
hearing these sentences, Kaukab trying to obtain legitimacy for her own decisions by
invoking his name. She wanted him to be angry, she needed him to be angry. She had
cast him in the role of the head of the household and he had to act accordingly […].
(MLL 111)
Kaukab, in accordance with her own upbringing, expects Shamas to fulfil his role as
authoritative head of the family, but his performance does not satisfy her, as MahJabin’s remembrance shows. Shamas thus fails to fulfil the roles of a believing
Muslim and family patriarch.
Betraying his own ethical guidelines, which sometimes clash with Islamic Law,
Shamas starts a secret love affair with Suraya, who returns to Dasht-e-Tanhaii from
Pakistan. Her husband divorced Suraya in a drunken stupor, which is why she had
27
Although Shamas himself was brought up as a Muslim, Kaukab very early in the novel reveals that
his father was born a Hindu and lost his memory as child and subsequently was educated as a
Muslim (cf. MLL 47).
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to return to England. Now her sole aim is to find a man who will marry her for a
short period of time and then divorce her again so that she can return to her first
husband to remarry him in Pakistan (cf. MLL 149). As the Islamic Law states that she
has to be married to another man before her first husband can take her back, she is
desperate to quickly find somebody before her first husband changes his mind and
does not want her back. When Suraya meets Shamas he is immediately drawn to her.
Finding her scarf on his way back home from the town centre, where he regularly
picks up the newspaper, his paper falls into the river. He walks along while bending
down to pick up the scarf: “He’s suddenly lighter, his muscles relieved, the fingers
holding nothing but that scarf which has butterfly blue lozenges along its crenulated
edges” (MLL 135). Suraya takes advantage of the physicality of this first encounter, in
which Shamas seems to rid himself of a burden, maybe the burden Kaukab has put
on him with her expectations, and starts an affair with him.
While Shamas actually enjoys the tenderness of their encounters, Suraya just
wants to trick him into marrying her. She exploits her femininity and her religious
beliefs to get Shamas to commit adultery and thus caters for her own personal needs,
not caring about the consequences of her actions or Shamas’ feelings (cf. MLL 254).
Suraya legitimises the affair and the adultery through her interpretation of Islamic
Law and her wish to remarry her first husband. She thus adapts her religiousness
and her ethical standards to her own personal needs and bends the laws, which she
actually breaks in sleeping with a man other than her husband, to reach her aims.
In contrast to the secular Shamas and the moderate Muslim Suraya, Kaukab is a
strict Islamist, justifying all her actions and her behaviour through her belief in Islam.
With her religious bigotry she puts off her three children who, in the course of the
narrative, visit the house only once. During this visit her estranged children get into a
heated discussion with Kaukab about the status of women in Pakistan and in which
she has to defend herself against the reproaches of her family (cf. MLL 323 ff.). Her
misconduct, such as for example poisoning her youngest son with bromide because a
Muslim cleric told her to do so (cf. MLL 303 f.), or marrying her only daughter to a
violent man in Pakistan (cf. MLL 326), both of which stem from her religious
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obscurantism, come to a climax when Shamas is attacked by a group of Islamists who
Kaukab had once secretly charged with finding her sons. In her blind belief in Islam
she finally blames Shamas for her children’s hatred (cf. MLL 328) and tries to take her
own life by copper poisoning. Even when it comes to her own physical health she
does not deviate but accepts her illness as a test of her faith.
[…] Kaukab has reached that age where her womb is slipping out of her vagina and
must be either surgically removed or stitched back to the inner lining of her body
[…]. […] Her womb — the first dress of her daughter, the first address of her sons —
is a constant source of pain these days and she comes down the stairs carefully. She
tells herself that she must bear up patiently, that a person is like a tealeaf: drop it into
boiling water if you want to see its true colour. She reads verses from the Koran
when the pain looks as though it is about to increase. (MLL 260)
In contrast to the idea of women “as mothers or wives […] called upon to literally
and figuratively reproduce the nation”28, Kaukab, who becomes increasingly ill with
lower abdomen pains, herself interprets the illness as a punishment for not having
raised believing Muslims. Yet, she also casts herself in the role of the self-sacrificing
mother and wife, the ‘immigrant woman victim’. She is actually not the only person
inflicting the greatest pain on those close to her, but also the character who, in her
religious bigotry, falls prey to those who instrumentalize her in the name of Islamist
fanaticism.
The three characters thus present a spectrum of religious faith that ranges from
secular Muslims via law-abiding and single-minded faith to Islamist fanaticism. Yet
this analysis of the characters has also shown that in accordance with Volpp’s ideas
about agency in patriarchy, the women in this novel are not always the subordinated
Other in the patriarchal Muslim community. The female characters, though accepting
the personal suffering associated with their beliefs, subversively use their gender
roles in order to accomplish their personal goals within the limits of the Islamic
community, while at the same time not crossing the boundaries the sharia sets them.
It further shows that it is only the secular Shamas who manages small steps towards
integration into the British society. It is his secularity that allows him to see things
28
Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (cf. note 20), here: 180.
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from different perspectives, in comparison to the limited point of view with which
Kaukab perceives the world around her.
Nevertheless, as with the creation of the claustrophobic atmosphere that
dominates the behaviour of the characters, this character constellation does not
conceal the criticism of the stereotyping attitudes of the characters. In the character of
Kaukab Aslam’s critique of religious obscurantism and Islamist fanaticism is obvious
and quite evident in her interaction with other characters. Yet, although it at first
glance seems to be the only possible way of integration, Shamas’ secularity is as
much criticised as Kaukab’s fanaticism:
Ujala says: ‘There couldn’t have been a more dangerous union than you two: you
were busy longing for the world and the time your grandparents came from, they
and their sayings and principles; and he was too busy daydreaming about the world
and the time his grandchildren were to inherit. What about your responsibilities to
the people who were around you here in the present? Those around her were less
important to her than those that lay buried below her feet, and for him the important
one were the ones that hovered above his head — those yet to be born.’ (MLL 324)
His own children accuse Shamas of being absent even though living in the same
house with them. Instead of caring for the here and now, his own family’s needs and
trying to change the society he lives in now, he is more concerned with utopian
fantasies of a more “just way of organizing the world” (MLL 324). Furthermore, his
turning a blind eye to the religious obscurantism in his neighbourhood and his wish
not to interfere in religious questions render him helpless to avoid the catastrophes
he sees coming:
He told Suraya about the concert during a brief encounter earlier today: the girl
whom Shamas saw on the riverbank with her secret Hindu lover a few weeks ago —
the young couple looking for the place where the disembodied human heart was
found — has been beaten to death by the holy man brought in to rid her of djinns.
(MLL 185)
Although Shamas, at the first encounter with the lovers, is well aware of the danger
the young people were in because of their cross-religious love, he neither tries to help
them break out of the community, nor to convince the girl’s parents to abandon the
idea of their child being possessed by evil spirits. He thus makes himself an
accomplice in this murder as much as he is responsible for Chanda and Jugnu’s fate.
Although he did not turn his back on them he neglected to protect them from their
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families and did not stand advocate their right to live together without being
married.
In presenting these two extreme poles of the spectrum in the characters of
Shamas and Kaukab and the moderate Suraya in the middle, Aslam reflects upon the
external perception and representation of Muslim immigrants in the media. Through
the use of focalization of all three characters, who are thus allowed to present their
own view on the events of the narrative and give an insight into their respective
value systems, Aslam allows the reader to interpret the characters own positioning
within the community without necessarily leading to a one-sided reading of the
novel.
IV. Conclusion
In my interpretation of the correlation of gender and religion within the atmosphere
of the novel I aim to strengthen my argument for the multiple possible
interpretations of Maps for Lost Lovers. While the claustrophobic atmosphere of the
narration mainly derives from the structure of the patriarchal society and the
mirroring of the former colonial situation of the Asian subcontinent, the construction
of the different gender roles in respect to religion shows that the characters are
subverting exactly these patriarchal structures. Through the character of Kaukab,
who stands in opposition to her husband Shamas in every possible way, the novel
challenges the idea of a Muslim society dominated by men. In Dasht-e-Tanhaii it is
actually the female characters, such as Kaukab and the matchmaker, or the woman
who tells her son-in-law to rape her daughter (cf. MLL 88), who shape the
community. It is the women of Dasht-e-Tanhaii who hold up the tradition of
marrying their daughters to their own cousins, as Kaukab has done with her
daughter, and who commit adultery in order to abide by Islamic law, like Suraya.
Consequently, it is the female characters of the novel that maintain the struggle for
the patriarchal, claustrophobic society, while some men, like Shamas, try to promote
a kind of intercultural understanding in the depicted community.
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Aslam’s novel challenges the essentialist idea that a particular community or a
character of a particular gender is “essentially this or essentially that”29. In fact,
Aslam powerfully undermines any singular interpretation of the narrative, in that
the novel offers a multi-layered critique of its depicted society, a critique which
moves beyond essentialist readings of this Pakistani community. In turning away
from the honour killings of Jugnu and Chanda as the main story line, and in giving
an insight into the value systems of the individual characters, the novel shows their
different ways of coping with loss. In touching upon topics like nationalism,
tradition, community and religion through the different perspectives of mainly first
generation immigrants, Maps for Lost Lovers offers a differentiated social commentary
on Muslim immigrants in Great Britain.
Taking up the notions of loss and exile, gender and religion, love and tradition,
the novel can be read as a critique of both the closed immigrant communities that
avert all attempts at integration, and the host cultures that easily fall for prejudices
without trying to look behind the façades. Additionally, Maps for Lost Lovers also
comments critically upon the repercussions of British colonialism and how the
colonial intrusion into different cultures affects the former colonies even years after
their independence and how the long-term consequences in turn interfere with the
immigrants’ integration into today’s British society. Most importantly, however, the
novel offers a reading and interpretation that puts love and loss into the focus of the
narration.
Contact Address:
Jutta Weingarten, M.A.
Justus-Liebig-University Giessen
English Department
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B
35394 Giessen
Germany
[email protected]
29
Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality,” in Journal of International
Women’s Studies 5.3 (2004), 75-86, here: 77.
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http://cultdoc.uni-giessen.de/wps/pgn/ep/cultdoc/juttaweingarten/juttaweingarten-ma
Keywords:
English: exile; renaming; gender roles; Islamic law; diasporic imaginary.
German: Exil; Umbenennung; Geschlechterrollen; islamisches Recht; diasporisch
Imaginäres.
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
http://eTransfers.uni-giessen.de
http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/research/anglogerman/etransfers/
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